


Even In Another Time

by nagia



Category: The Borgias (2011)
Genre: Birthday Amnesty Agreement Fic, F/M, Fix-It, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-18
Updated: 2018-07-28
Packaged: 2018-12-03 16:58:57
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 10,150
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11536494
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nagia/pseuds/nagia
Summary: Against all reason, it almost makes her laugh.  Has today truly started?  If this is a dream, it feels real.  And yet she cannot conceive that this is truly happening.  Are her brother's promises so grave, so vast, that she has been returned to —To the last time in her life that she could have called herself bloodless and clean?





	1. a glass of cantarella

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is what I like to call a "Birthday Amnesty Agreement" Fic. AKA this may never be bigger than it is now. But I'm going to post it anyway, because it's been sitting in the folder a long time, and today is still my birthday.
> 
> I apologize for nothing; Cait and Rhion should have found better straps.
> 
> UPDATE 2018: So, I've added a second chapter. If all goes well, there will be nine, but god only knows what the update schedule will look like. Things should start moving much more quickly (and to more interesting places) if I can get the third chapter off the ground.

Any man who tries to be good all the time is bound to come to ruin among the great number who are not good. Hence a prince who wants to keep his authority must learn how not to be good, and use that knowledge, or refrain from using it, as necessity requires.

— _The Prince_ , Niccolo Machiavelli

Beyond all hope, I prayed those timeless  
days we spent might be made twice as long.  
I prayed one word: I want.  
Someone, I tell you, will remember us,  
even in another time.

— "Six Fragments for Athis," Sappho

#

Only a handsbreadth away, Alfonso lies dead, staring still at the ceiling or the sky, his face finally gone slack rather than clenched in agony. If she moved her arm just so, if she splayed her fingers a little more, she would be touching the cooling skin of her sad second husband. A man she almost loved.

But though the awareness is there, tingling through her fingertips and hollow in her belly, the thought that circles and circles once and again through her mind thunders through in Cesare's voice. _Naked and clean and bloodless again_ , he'd told her. _And mine._

His.

She can't decide whether the thought is bitter or sweet. She does not try. Only lets it pass, as she has allowed so much to pass. Lets it pass through unmolested, as so many armies have marched, against all reason.

She almost laughs at herself. She, who knew so little and learned so late. What does Lucrezia Borgia know of reason?

Cesare's touch is tender as he washes the blood from her face and hands. There are sword calluses on his palms, now, rather than the softer scholar's calluses she'd known him to have in their younger days, when he was yet a man of the cloth. But his skin is still soft, mostly, and his grip is gentle as he slides the shoulders of her dress away, pressing his lips in the wake of the fabric.

She closes her eyes, and lets herself fall into the exhausted sleep of a physic's nurse in the circle of his arms.

#

She wakes to sunlight that seems brighter than it ought, on a pillow that feels scratchy against her cheek, and the scents of citrus and fresh-hewn grass tickling her nose. Doves coo somewhere beyond her chamber, and Lucrezia smiles without opening her eyes. Cesare has carried her away in the night, and she should be wroth with him, but she cannot. He has always done this, and as she fell asleep in his arms within reach of her dead husband, she can hardly blame him.

Alfonso is gone, she realizes, and closes her eyes even tighter, curling in on herself with the sudden pain. She remembers this heartbreak, the way it had left her pale and feverish, eyes aching from crying, stomach ever roiling.

She had hoped never to feel it again. But that cannot be avoided, and neither can this odious day. She forces herself to open her eyes, trying to forge her courage into steel that she might face it.

But her determination not to let her grief overpower her turns to shock as she looks upon a chamber she knows from childhood. She remembers her childhood things being cleared away, packed away, in preparation for her first marriage. And yet here they all are. There is even a gown for her to wear, tossed over the chair by her dressing table, as she'd always done growing up. 

Lucrezia stands and makes her barefoot — barefoot? — way across the chamber's stone floors. Had she not had rugs placed in her rooms, to better protect her son from falls? The stone is at least warm under her feet, and she remembers that, too, the way spring sunlight had always left her floor warmer. But is it not autumn? Did she not spy leaves in the courtyard yesterday?

She picks up the dress to inspect it, wrinkling her nose as she does. She remembers this dress all too well — creamy pale and shot through with blue, with such decadent, elaborate stitching. It had been one of her favorites, in her girlhood, but it hardly seems appropriate now. And her body has changed since Giovanni's birth; surely this dress couldn't hope to fit — 

Giovanni.

Lucrezia drops the dress back onto the chair and turns in search of a dressing gown. She finds one and pulls it close about herself, stepping from her chamber to the rest of her rooms.

Books, and bits of fabric, and the papers and paints she'd experimented with. Years ago, now. She'd been in this room just the last week, and all of it had been cleared away. Why has it been returned?

And why is all of this here, but no cradle, and no Giovanni?

Lucrezia is just reaching for the door when it swings open, and Claudia steps in. The other woman carries a pitcher under one arm and a tray of bread and honey balancing between her other hand and her body. The same things Claudia has brought her every morning, from her earliest memories on.

The same things Claudia has not brought her in more than seven years, because Claudia was dismissed as her lady's maid when Lucrezia married Giovanni Sforza.

Lucrezia opens her mouth to ask where her son is, but Claudia says, in a hush, "Has my lady heard? The Pope has fallen ill again, and his Eminence has gone to the Curia to see if our Holy Father will rise from his sickbed."

And those are the exact words that Claudia had said to her on that day eight years ago, when Pope Innocent had died. It makes sense, that Claudia would be saying this to her, and yet it doesn't, because how can it?

Dizzy, sure that this is some new manner of dream, Lucrezia tries to answer as she had then. She doesn't remember what she said — Claudia's half of that conversation is writ fierce in her memory, like carvings upon stone, but her own replies had been of less note — and so she isn't sure how to respond at first. At length, she offers, "No, I hadn't heard. I only awakened a few moments ago."

"Of course, my lady," Claudia says. She sets the tray on a table and pours the pitcher of water into a basin. "Come, shall we prepare you for the day?"

The same question Claudia had always asked before she brushed out Lucrezia's hair while Lucrezia broke her fast. And, indeed, she seems to expect Lucrezia to sit and allow her hair brushed while she eats bread and honey.

Lucrezia sits. She stares into the mirror at a face that is far younger than she saw in her looking glass yesterday morning. She raises her hands to the light and looks down upon them. Clean and pale as milk, without the blemish of calluses. No tell-tale stains of rust upon her skin, not even under the nails, where she has learned that blood likes to linger. Indeed, it is as Cesare has said.

Truly this must be some dream. She will wake, and she will be in a different room in the palace she shares — shared — with Alfonso and her mother, with so many frequent visits from Cesare. She will wake, and Giovanni will be calling for her, crying for her, and she will hold him and comfort him.

Her hollowed-out heart lurches within her chest at the thought, squeezing until she could cry out with it.

Neither the bread nor the honey has any taste in her mouth; they only turn to paste as she chews and swallows, chews and swallows, and washes it down with water that burns cold. The sweetness has quite gone from her life, she thinks. She pushes it aside, and when her hair is pinned back, washes her face from the basin of steaming water. Claudia helps her into the dress that should not have fit.

Lucrezia had forgotten how rough it had felt. She's worn so much silk, and so much more velvet, for so long that her fingers prickle as she runs them along the nap of the fabric, and the sensation is quite foreign.

She steps into the courtyard and stops, again. She knows too well the sound of Cesare's gasps. Has known it for nigh on ten years — she had begun her spying upon him by listening.

Truly is this that morning? Why is she dreaming of this?

She expects to see something monstrous, or perhaps herself, when she makes her way to his window. The grass tickles her ankles and the soles of her feet, but she does not care; it cannot distract her from watching her brother at his pleasure. He looks like a painting by Caravaggio — light and shadow drift and dart, roiling like some strong sea-tide, with his every liquid movement. His eyes have fallen half-closed, and she ignores the woman, dark-haired but pale-skinned, to trace the beloved, familiar curves of his face with her eyes.

But then her gazes falls on the dark, straight hair of the other woman, and something like hatred burns in her. It's like an ember sitting inside her belly, reaching with furious fingers to grasp at her heart, to squeeze at it, and thick tendrils of that choking heat burrow into her lungs. She can no more move or breathe than she can think.

When it is over, when he admits to his place in the priesthood, she ducks down from the window. Her fingers make a noise against the shutter, and she hears her brother gasp her name.

The game that follows is familiar, so familiar. How many mornings have they spent this way? Her brother chasing her through the grass of the courtyard outside his rooms, shouting, the sunlight warm on her skin and the grass soft on the soles of her feet. The world spins, and, spinning, she falls.

Cesare covers her with his own body, face so close, and even now, even in this maddening dream, the touch of his hand is like a kiss of the sun. He is a brighter thing, in this memory, in this dream, than he has been in a long time, and her heart swells and aches at the sight of it.

She raises a hand to his cheek, and finds his skin soft beneath her palm. The light beard he's barely managed to grow hardly even scratches as she touches it.

"I miss this, brother," she tells him, and watches as his brow wrinkles in confusion.

He rolls so that he can land with his back on the grass beside her, but he turns his head so they can keep looking upon each other. His brow may bespeak bemusement, but she sees grave concern in the green of his eyes. "You spied upon me just last week, my love."

"Did I? I feel I must have been a child, then."

She had been a child then.

"You say this as if you are not a child now." She did not think it possible, but the concern deepens. His mouth curves ever downward.

"You know I am not." She watches him for another moment, and then says, "I suppose I mean to say I will miss this."

Cesare's brows arch up. He sits up, then, pulling away from her. His confusion and concern, his startlement, all are writ large upon his face. "Is this a riddle, sis?"

Lucrezia sits up, too. "Pope Innocent lies on his deathbed. Father will surely become Pope, and then I must marry. No one in Christendom will call themselves pleased to have a Borgia Pope; he will need alliances. Is this not so, brother? I do not pretend to understand politics, but —"

"Perhaps the Papal elections will run their course, and Father will —" But it is a foolish thought — surprisingly so, for Cesare — and she sees the moment he recognizes his own misapprehension. Even now, even this young, he must surely understand that the house of Borgia has only two options for survival: it may rise, or it may return to Spain.

And even returning to Spain may not save them.

"Father will become Pope," he agrees, at length, and gives a heavy sigh. "I will become what he wishes of me, and you will marry. And here today started so well."

Against all reason, it almost makes her laugh. Has today truly started? If this is a dream, it feels real. And yet she cannot conceive that this is truly happening. Are her brother's promises so grave, so vast, that she has been returned to —

To the last time in her life that she could have called herself bloodless and clean?

If anyone's could be, his could, she supposes.

Cesare turns to look at her at the sound of her laughter, and she shakes her head. "It's the way you said that. I'm sorry. I'm not laughing at you." She smiles at him — for him — and then says, "Come, brother, help me up. I'm sure you must go to the Vatican, and Mother will be looking for me soon."

He pushes himself to his feet in the quick, graceful movements she remembers. He has always been full of grace, a startling smoothness and agility. It is not what one would expect from a priest or a bishop, nor even an archbishop. But she supposes it makes sense that he should be thus, with his long desire to be other than what he is.

Cesare pulls her to her feet with the same ease, and she laughs again, feeling light and free. She steps into his space with the swiftness and the delicacy of a dancer and places a kiss upon his cheek. It has been her habit for the last few years to let such kisses linger, and she does so today. His cheek is so soft beneath her lips, as soft as his hands, and she lets her eyes fall closed.

He, too, is yet bloodless, she realizes. If this is real, she wants both to rail at the good Lord, with all the fury of Job, that she must live her life over again — and to fall to her knees in praise of Him, for giving her a second chance. She can save him, maybe. She can save them both.

She can save them all. She can save poor, doomed Prince Djem, and Paolo, and Juan from himself, perhaps, if he wishes it. She can save Alfonso.

If this is real, it is, she thinks, the most perfect Purgatorio that God could ever have wrought for her.

#

The sense that this is a dream never quite goes away, but it does lessen with time. The things that follow are too logical, one following from another in clear lines. And slowly, slowly, she begins to accept that this world is real, or real enough that her disquiet matters not.

Her memories, though, do not fade, and she finds herself occasionally startling others around her. She has grown, since this day. Been married twice and borne a third man's son. She has saved men from poison, and committed murder, and it is so hard to make of herself less than she is. Even with Cesare, she must pretend, though not as much.

She speaks too much, she comes to realize, like a woman who has managed a household of her own, rather than a child who has never left her mother's home. She does not protest her innocence — or perhaps her ignorance — often enough. But these are things Lucrezia cannot make herself do, and so she contents herself to bite her tongue when her mother pulls her close and pets her hair.

"How much you have grown, in just a few short days," Mother says, and Lucrezia keeps her silence, because there is nothing she can say that will not sound mad.

Mother squeezes her and presses a kiss to her brow. "Try not to grow so quickly," she says, and now that she has been a mother, Lucrezia recognizes the ragged edge of bitter-sweetness in those words in a way she might not have, before. "I do not think I am ready for you to go from me."

"Perhaps I will not always be here, but I will always be your child," Lucrezia replies. She offers her mother an honest smile, though she suspects a shade of sadness in it, and adds, "I am not eager to be married and leave my family."

#

Cesare and Juan spend the days of her adjustment skulking about, unwinding messages from about the feet of doves, and vanishing when they ought be sitting down to dinner or in the middle of the night, such that they don't appear to break their fast in the mornings. Juan spends two days and a night out of the house, and when he returns, both he and Cesare wear expressions of annoyance. Cesare hides his better than Juan does, but both carry their shoulders stiffly, their eyes narrowed in suspicion and frustration. Juan's eyes even have dark circles beneath them, and he looks pale and drawn, as if he's been going short of sleep.

She thinks she approached Cesare with this, eight years ago. This time, she goes to Juan, because Cesare will try to help her keep an innocence she does not have. And, truly if she must be cruel to one of her brothers —

Juan actually jumps when she asks him, "How many votes have we yet to buy?"

He turns to her, wide-eyed, staring. And she realizes that she is not a Lucrezia that he knows any longer. She is a Lucrezia who dealt with King Charles, who tried to choose a king, although she chose poorly, who did not weep when he died.

"Why, sister, I might think you know too much," he drawls, but his eyes dart.

He's evading. For his sake, or for their father's? For the whole family? She looks at him and cannot say. She does not know enough.

"I know that the other Cardinals hate Father. I know that the election is in the hands of the Cardinals. And I know that Father would be Pope." She shrugs one shoulder, as if her conclusions are clear enough to draw from that. She supposes they are. They certainly seem clear to her.

It draws a laugh from Juan, and she feels her whole body clench in preparation for some cruelty. But the sound rings free, echoing off the walls of their palace, and her brother reaches out to clap her on the shoulder. Surprisingly, there is no malice in it, only the edge of gentle mockery that Juan has always used with her.

"Too clever by half," he tells her. And then he looks fully upon her, his expression darkening to something serious. "But we cannot accuse our father of simony, can we?"

"There will be too many such accusations from outside our walls," she agrees, and it is such a struggle to keep her tone pleasant and even. If she'd had this conversation with him eight years ago, she might have cowered, but now, she wants to counter his subtle threat with one of her own.

It is a problem, because — for now — she has nothing to threaten him with. And, truly, her hatred of Juan had cooled, some, in the months following his death. She had not wept for him, nor wished for him back, but she had been satisfied, in a sick way, that he had paid for his crimes. It had been an awful feeling, to realize that she had been satisfied with the thought that her own brother had died in pain and fear, but she had not been entirely ashamed of it. Still, it leaves her unprepared, now, to kill him for what he might do.

"It would not do for there to be whispers within this house."

"No, of course. It's just… I only wanted to know how much longer father's errands would keep you and our brother away. Mother misses you both."

"Hopefully not one day more. I tire of it."

She could plague him for that. Ask innocently if he means he tires of doing Father's bidding. But she has no heart for it. Indeed, she wants this conversation to be at an end, and so she only smiles and pats his arm consolingly.

#

There are two days more of voting, and then the word spreads through the streets, curling and chasing like flame: white smoke. White smoke pours from the chimney in the Vatican. The word comes from a servant at the gate, and floods through the house.

She could almost imagine the sound as an ocean wave, filling each room with the knowledge, knocking things about and sending everyone tumbling after, dragging them from their feet. Or she could see it as the white smoke they speak of, spreading and rising, roiling, choking them all.

They follow the word out into the streets, all of an accord they need not give voice to. Cesare takes her hand, towing her in his wake, with Juan and Joffre and Mother behind them. This, at least, is as it had been, then; then, she'd followed him meekly, knowing that he knew the way better than she did. Now, having lived years in the Vatican, she knows the way as well as he. And yet she feels no need to take back her hand; it is good, to be held by him, to be led by him.

It has only been a few days, and wroth as she still is over Alfonso's death, she misses the way he touched her.

They arrive to find dozens, even hundreds, of people already within the square. No one has come to the balcony yet, but all eyes have turned to it.

Cesare's fingers squeeze hers, warm and solid and _real_.

The time passes in such a crawl that it might be minutes, or an hour, or ten, before the Protodeacon flings wide the doors to the balcony. He steps forward, all the way to the rail, and calls out in joy and triumph and relief, all of it writ fierce on his face, " _Annuntio vobis gaudium magnum: habemus Papam_!"

The crowd cheers. They can have no notion of the politics behind it, of the strife and the simony. They do not know of her brothers' tireless work, or the toil of those who politicked against Father, only that there was no Pope for days, and now there is again a Pope in Rome. Lucrezia spares a moment to wonder if their ignorance is better.

If _her_ ignorance had been better.

" _Eminentissimum ac reverendissimum Dominum_ ," the Protodeacon calls to them. " _Dominum Rodrigo Sanctæ Romanæ Ecclesiæ Cardinalem Borgia, qui sibi nomen imposuit Alexander Sextus._ "

And then the Protodeacon retreats, and her father steps out, into the light. She and Cesare both stare, and though she has seen this before, the sheer glory of it is undiminished. How could seeing it a second time ever hope to dull this victory, to take the pride and beauty from this sight? The white cassock gleams in the sun, as brilliant and pure as their Borgia blood never was. He looks not like an angel but like a prophet, gaunt and hollow-eyed and victorious and grave, paternal. Father to the thousand people of Rome. Father to the faith, to the whole of Christendom.

This is what her mother meant, she realizes, even as her father drones, " _Sancti Apostoli Petrus et Paulus: de quorum potestate et auctoritate confidimus, ipsi intercedant pro nobis ad Dominum,_ " and the courtyard all fall to their knees upon the _amen_ , by kings and Popes belonging to their people. This is why he began to call himself 'we,' and why he is Holy Father but she was never Holy Daughter, as she once joked with Cesare.

 _Amen_ they all call, Joffre — so soon to be married, almost as soon as she — with his high voice, and Juan in his tenor, and her mother and Cesare, too, and she realizes that even she is saying the words, by rote, as if a lever has been pulled and her voice must follow. _Amen, amen._

Thus is her father, Rodrigo Borgia, who never married her mother, and will soon take an entirely different woman to his bed, made Pope of Rome.

#

Her father's investiture as Pope is as moving and beautiful as it had been the first time. And, as she had the first time, Lucrezia sits ahead, with Cesare. Juan had huffed but given way with the equanimity she remembered, more displeased to be relegated to the place of women and children than anything else. Even now, she knows, he and Cesare are uneasy with each other, though not so uneasy as they had been in the months before Juan's death.

This time, she watches her father with more knowing eyes, and catches the look of _fear_ on his face. He looks almost as he had in the aftermath of his poisoning, when he had stared out at the world from the other side of something very like madness.

As she watches, Lucrezia realizes that she and the important people of Rome are witnessing her father's first crisis of faith.

She touches her fingers to the outside of Cesare's wrist. She tightens her grip very briefly, just long enough to catch his attention, and then says, "Father is frightened."

Cesare reaches over, touching his fingertips to the back of her hand. The softness of his hands still startles her, even though she had longed for it. 

"You think so, sis?"

She turns to look at him. "Do you not see it on his face?"

Cesare keeps his eyes forward, but she knows nonetheless that he's looking closely at their father. Trying to see what she sees, or at least why she thinks she sees it. After a long, long moment, he says, "What could frighten him?"

"He is the Pope of Rome," she says. "I don't know what could frighten such a man. Cesare, what do you think Father has to fear?"

He doesn't answer. He's staring too hard at Father.

She cannot help but watch him, and wonder what this knowledge will do. What it will drive him to.

"I do not know what Father fears," he says at last. "But I know what I do." He turns, then, and runs the pads of his fingertips along the back of her head, tracing her pearled caul, worrying at its edges, where the mesh meets her hair. His expression is tender, but she sees the same edge of caution he wore so often, after Father's rise.

She longs to tilt her head, to rest it more fully in his grasp. They sit in the Sistine Chapel, with its famous, beautiful choir singing a counterpoint to their father's investiture, but Cesare's touch is why she feels holy. And here, in God's very house, in what must surely be the holiest chapel in all of Christendom, as her father is made the head of the Bride of Christ, she craves her brother as she has not since before her wedding to Alfonso.

Truly, what was she born to be, but Borgia?

Almost worse, Cesare will not confide his fear in her, she realizes. Not openly. She must find a way to stop being the sister whose innocence and sweetness he would die to preserve and become — what? What was she to him, the night he called her his?

Their relationship has changed, and the truth is, Lucrezia cannot pinpoint quite how, but she must make it change in that direction again, if she is to have the part of him she seeks, if she is to have her chance at the best of her brother.

#

This time, she overhears the conversation in which her father and mother part ways with far different ears, and sees it through different eyes. Listening to her father's voice, watching their bodies as they speak, she realizes that his objection lies not in his love for her mother ending. He loves her as much as he ever has, and always will — 

But staying true to one woman is not in his nature. Nor is it his nature to keep a weakness near him, and Vanozza Cattaneo is certainly that, at least to people outside their family. Not only does she live in the house of a man not her husband, not only does she bear his children, but she was once a courtesan, and all know it. It would be scandalous, for the Pope to remain tied to her.

This time, though, Lucrezia sees and understands the pain that flashes over her mother's face. To be pushed away by the one you love most in the world, to wake one morning and find that everything has changed — these things, she understands all too well.

And so she rises from her father's side, pausing only once to look back at him, to see his smooth, grave features, and then tumbles headlong after her mother.

Her mother's doors are closed, but Lucrezia knocks at them, and when her mother's voice, still strong, still steady, asks, "Who needs me?" in reply, Lucrezia feels her own heart break a little.

"I want for nothing, Mother," she calls back. "But please, may I come in?"

She wants to believe that she would open the door to Giovanni — if he had lived long enough to speak, if he had ever said he needed her, she would have without question, without pause — but she cannot imagine willingly showing him her pain. The tears of the mother are not for the child to see.

But Mother does open the door, and Lucrezia goes in after her. As fidelity is not her father's nature, nor faith in her brother's, it is not in her to watch her own mother's heart break and do nothing. Even if there is nothing she can do. Even if it is not her place. Even if she is a fool for it.

"You said that kings and Popes belonged to their people," she offers. The words seem small to her, not nearly enough to plaster over the hole her father has gouged in her mother's heart.

In reply, Mother offers her a smile. It's a brave expression — but almost meaningless. It does not touch her eyes.

Lucrezia reaches out and clasps her mother's hands, and then she is hugging her mother, pulling her close by the shoulders. "You knew you would lose him," she says, and, "I am sorry, Mother, I am so sorry for it," and, "I know we are not the same, but you still have us. You have Cesare, and Juan, and Joffre, and me."

She once told her mother that she would be glad indeed to have half the grace and beauty Vanozza did, and that has never been truer than today, than now. For her mother allows herself to be held, but does not weep, and Lucrezia sees so much of everything she learned of motherhood in her own mother, and she is proud and sad and can say none of it.

After a few moments, Vanozza shifts, and Lucrezia releases her.

Her mother smiles down at her, resting one hand against her cheek. "Whatever else Rodrigo and I might say," she says, "we did well, when we made you."

She hadn't thought herself so much a girl as to feel her heart warm with the high praise. And yet perhaps she will always be that much a girl. Cesare and Juan had carried their boyhood needs of Father's praise, Father's approval, into manhood. Juan had carried his to his grave.

"Thank you, Mother," she says, and means it, and knows that just how _much_ she means it must show in her voice, because Mother's brows rise.

But Lucrezia makes no explanation. There can be none. Instead, she stays with her mother, in her mother's rooms, until the call to dinner, talking of matters without consequence.

#

Father and Cesare do not come and dine with them. Indeed, she has missed Cesare's departure entirely, it would seem. Juan informs her, voice and face both sour, that they have gone to some feast or other at Cardinal Orsini's palace. Lucrezia cannot recall why, but the thought fills her with dread. Something had happened there. Someone had died somehow — she'd heard, much later, rumors of poison, but she is living anew in the days when she had been a child, and nobody had told her anything — and it had pulled Juan from her mother's house late that night.

She doesn't like the thought of Cesare and her father in a house where Death is also a party guest, but they have gone, so she has no time to object, no time to beg them to stay home. So she eats dinner and teases Juan and Joffre. Joffre is easy; she long ago learned the art of doing so gently, of winding him up and then setting him down easily, without hurting him.

Juan is harder. She looks across the table at him — drinking his wine unwatered, unlike the rest of them — and she knows exactly what to say to hurt him. There is so much history here, even if he remembers none of it, that it's hard to find a reason _not_ to.

Still, under her mother's eye, she restrains herself. Merely leans forward and places her hand over Juan's empty wineglass when the servant carrying the decanter passes by.

"No more for my dear brother," she says, "I fear he has had enough already."

This prompts the sourest look yet from Juan and the question, "What would you know about it?"

She just smiles sweetly, and says, "It's starting to show."

A lie, of course. But she can't resist the need to needle at him. And perhaps turning away from drink now may even do him some good in a few years.

He gives way with ill grace, but he still gives way. She sees his eyes turn longingly to the decanter as it passes by, but his pride won't let him acknowledge or continue the game she now plays, even to win it.

After dinner, Juan and Joffre go off to do — she doesn't hear, actually, her thoughts too full of her own matters — but something. Together. She finds it cause for concern. She just finds it less worrying than what Juan had done after the dinner she remembers. He had taken the decanter to his rooms and not emerged until the call for the guard had come.

Doing something with Joffre is better, is it not?

Lucrezia doesn't return to her rooms as she had the first time she lived this night. Instead, she heads into the courtyard and paces around it. Night has long fallen, turning the sky the purple of a king's cloak. A pair of annoyed servants drift out to light lanterns for her, and then dart back inside.

It is perhaps the first moment she's truly had to herself since all of this began again. She seizes the opportunity to consider what she must change.

First, she must save Djem. Which means she must determine what he died of. Looking back, the servants' talk that his death paid her dowry seems less cruel and more honest. She had done some research, though not enough, into the marsh fevers when she had gone to Naples, to make sure she might recognize its signs if a mosquito struck. What she recalls of those symptoms does not mesh well with what she remembers of Djem's sudden illness.

It certainly doesn't match what she herself suffered. Lucrezia almost has to laugh at herself. Bedridden with heartbreak — what a fool she'd been! How kind the world had been to her!

So. If it had not been marsh fever, what killed Djem? The answer that comes swiftest is poison, but she is not sure. Those deaths are usually swifter than what poor Djem suffered.

This bears more thought, she realizes.

And as just how little she knows begins to chafe at her again, she hears the soft noise of something wooden striking the stone of their outer walls. She looks up and sees a pair of dark shapes above the wall of the palace, over the tiles that make up its roof. Lucrezia squints into the darkness, but the shade doesn't resolve into a shape she can name.

Until she sees the figure of a man scaling it, before being jerked abruptly down.

A ladder. Someone had been climbing their walls with a ladder.

She screams, and hears the booted footsteps of Juan's condottieri moving for her. The shape of the ladder vanishes, pulled down, it would seem, by some unseen hand. But another one goes up, and the condottieri move past her, drawing their swords, their eyes fixed on the walls and the roof. One of them has the foresight to crank his crossbow and aim it upward.

A quarrel crashes into the wall and then clatters harmlessly to the ground, even as the second ladder vanishes backwards.

Lucrezia backs away, into the darkened halls, and moves to one of the servants' doors by the kitchen. She could not say for certain whence the impulse comes — neither Cesare nor Micheletto ever advised her on what to do in case her home is attacked — but fleeing, not by the main gate, seems the wisest course.

The cobblestones of the street outside seem cold, and she realizes she is barefoot again. There is something slick as she leaves the alley, and she all but stumbles in it, hissing words her father would hate to hear from her under her breath. She has to catch herself on the alley wall, passing someone slumped against it, and as she goes around the corner, she sees Micheletto holding a man from behind.

Something metal glints; her brother twists out of the way.

Lucrezia did not know blood could spray thus. She has seen it run, of course; it stains her thighs once a month, and in the aftermath of Giovanni's birth, it had poured for weeks, unable to be stanched, and she had been glad of all the old dresses her mother had given her. She saw it seep constantly from Alfonso's wounds, drawing his life out with it in endless hours, until she had at last given him a more merciful end.

This, though, is like the jet of a geyser, like the flow of a fountain. She stares as it paints the wall and ground around him.

It is Micheletto who sees her first. Such is his nature, to be always watching.

"My lord," he says, and points, and Cesare turns to see her.

She cannot make out much of his face in the starry darkness, but she sees and hears the blade drop from his fingers. He moves toward her, and she crosses to meet him, the both of them heedless of the bodies and the blood. He catches her in his arms and closes them around her, and it is as she told him — will tell him — years ago, years from now. His touch is like sunlight and summer, like a benediction from God and the Virgin and all the saints, and she tucks her cheek to rest against his shoulder, and he drops his chin to the crown of her head.

She feels him sigh with relief. She sighs it, too.

"You are safe," he says to her, and, even though she has only let out her breath, "hush, now, you're safe. Thank God. Ha, and I should thank you, too, Micheletto. I would die if anything happened to her."

"Your mistress?" Micheletto asks, and Lucrezia snorts out a laugh.

Appalled, Cesare answers, "My sister."

She does not lift her head to see Micheletto's face, but the tone of his silence changes, somehow. Lucrezia is glad that her smile is hidden behind Cesare's arms; Micheletto did not read and knew no classics, but he was never a fool.

"My sister," Cesare says again, like he's trying to remind himself, and she does raise her head then, to give him a kiss on the cheek that she suspects of being anything but sisterly.

He allows it to linger for a moment longer than a doting elder brother ought and then lets her go. She smiles at him, and then turns to Micheletto. "You are my brother's servant?"

"I am but a professional," Micheletto says, cautiously. "But I serve him in this matter, lady."

"You will keep him safe," she says, and her question has an edge to it that might, she thinks, shade into either prophecy or command. But she is Borgia. They do not make requests.

"I will," Micheletto agrees. There is a quality to his hoarse voice that she thinks might be amusement, but she does not look to see.

"Go back into the house," Cesare tells her. "There are matters Juan and Micheletto and I must take care of. You need not trouble yourself with them."

"They were going to come over the wall. They were going to kill us. But I am not to be troubled at it?"

"You are not. And you have blood on your feet. Go and wash, sister, and go to bed. It will be a long night; longer, if you don't."

She reaches out and takes his hands. Squeezes them. He squeezes back, and then turns away.

#

That night, as she scrubs blood from the soles of her feet and where it splashed up onto her ankles, she realizes that the surest way to save Paolo is never to meet him at all. Marry someone else, not Giovanni Sforza — which is not in itself a trial — and never lie with Pesaro's stable boy.

If she wants him to live, she must never have him.

God will never send her Giovanni.

She goes to bed still weeping.


	2. il assassino

Lucrezia wakes, and wants to weep. The sunlight seems frail and dim this morning, not enough to lift the cloud that has descended upon her. She craves Cesare's hand again, the way he has always made her every worry, her every childhood heartbreak, seem so meaningless.

His touch, his words, his voice — these have always been all the sunshine she needed.

She thinks again of Paolo, of Alfonso, and most of all of her son, and feels her face crumple in for another bout of tears. They soak into her pillow and coverlets, and she runs her hands over the fabric again. Not as soft as she'd had in Naples, or even as she'd had in Rome, when she'd fled back to it. But still certainly soft enough for an unmarried girl.

Her tears are drying by the time Claudia bustles in with a tray and a pitcher. They wash away the blotchy redness, and Claudia picks up the hairbrush. Lucrezia closes her eyes and luxuriates in the feeling of the brush trailing through her hair. It's a heavy, gentle weight against her head. She could almost imagine a lover carding his fingers through it.

"You look much better, my lady," Claudia says, breaking the spell.

When she opens her eyes, her cheeks are a healthy color, but there is a spark of mischief in her gaze in the mirror. A secret, hidden. Something forbidden.

"I suppose I do," she says, and rises to finish dressing.

#

But Cesare is gone, spending the day at the Vatican. So Lucrezia breaks her fast with Mother and Joffre, dining on summer fruits and honey-sweetened cream, and then drifts, aimless, through the house until she happens upon the library.

Funny. It's a familiar, beloved sight, with its many windows, and its scroll cabinet and tall bookshelf, and all the reading couches. There's even a writing desk, with candelabra placed all around it. Familiar, and beloved, and yet she doesn't think she ever spent so much time here.

Rather than turn to her father's books, Lucrezia looks to the maps. She studies the great map of Italy on one of the walls. The mid-morning sun strikes it well enough, and she trails her fingers over the delicate calligraphy scrawling over it. She retrieves a set of map pins, with thin bodies and sharp tips, and pushes them into the places she remembers.

She remembers Naples. And Pesaro. And poor, doomed Lucca. Florence, too, and Milan. And of course Cesare had married France, and Juan had married Spain. Father must have thought himself so clever, to marry one son to the House of Aragon that sits astride Naples, and the other to the House of Trastamara.

Lucrezia finds Squillace on the map, and laughs. Principality of Squillace. Joffre, a Prince of the House of Aragon.

It is so far south, and east, and its place on the map seems so small.

She looks at it and wonders. Would she deny her brother his principality? Does she even have that power?

He might at least be safe. He had been well out of the madness following Father's poisoning and their brother's assault on Forli. He'd even managed to stay out of the madness that enveloped her in Naples. Perhaps it is the safest place for him.

She could laugh at herself. Who is she, to decide what is and isn't safe? She, who could not even number or name all their many enemies?

Lucrezia spends the rest of the day reading in the library, moving about it to stay with the light. She passes a long, golden afternoon in a couch someone had positioned perfectly beneath a window, and lets the hours drift by like honey drizzling. When her eyes tire, she sets the book aside and rests her head against the back of the couch, smiling at the velvet upholstery, and tries for a nap. Colors wheel across the backs of her eyelids, and the world retreats a while.

#

If she does not wed Giovanni Sforza, then who? This is the thought that fills her mind as she makes her way to the Vatican. Her dress feels lighter around her than any of the things she wore after her marriage, and she had noticed this morning that the waistline is higher. However old her mind might be — she seems to recall being four-and-twenty — her body is eight years younger, and it shows not only in her height, but in the size of her breasts, the slenderness of her hips and belly.

She misses her son. She would have burned down the world to have him by her side. She can only pray that he was meant to be, that God the Father will be good to her, will find a way to send him to her, no matter who his father must be in this life.

But her pregnancy and the years she nursed him certainly changed her figure.

She dismisses these thoughts as she passes a Cardinal. The Sforza Cardinal, she thinks, one of the few who had been loyal to her father in the aftermath of the poisoning. She supposes that makes him the only loyal Sforza in all of Italy; certainly Giovanni and Catherina had been far more treacherous than even her father could have suspected.

But this knowledge does her no good just now.

No, she must marry someone other than Giovanni Sforza, and she needs to have some idea who.

Her father may claim he acts for the good of the family, but she has learned. He acts in accordance with his ambition, and however little or much he cherishes her, he will never hesitate to sell her to an advantageous match. She must have her plan in place before he even entertains any offers.

All of this means she must re-learn the balance of power among the noble families of Italy. It is in her thoughts to go to Florence if she can at all manage it. If the King of France can be turned aside there, her father and brothers will be able to focus on their truer enemies. The Sforza are certainly not an option, and she will avoid any Neapolitan entanglements as she would avoid the Neapolitan fever, which leaves — 

All of these thoughts fly from her head as she passes the woman sitting for a portrait.

Lucrezia remembers being struck by la Bella Farnese's beauty, the first day they met. But she had never met Giulia Farnese before. Now, that lovely face has grown both dear to her and familiar, and the sight of it does not strike her where she stands. Still, she makes her eyes trace the curve of the cheek, sweep across the bridge of her nose, the dark, tender tangle of eyelashes, and the way the sun glints on the curl of her hair.

"She's much more beautiful than your painting," Lucrezia says. She thinks she said something to that effect, when she was here before.

"It is not finished, lady," the painter — Pinturicchio — says, and here, here is where Lucrezia remembers her place in the play.

"Then you must do better," she says, immediately, and begins to point at the charcoal sketch. "Her hair curls. Here, and here."

Pinturicchio scowls at her, and Lucrezia offers him a smile. She drifts away from him, toward Giulia. "Who is she?" She asks, ostensibly to Pinturicchio, but she keeps her eyes on Giulia.

Giulia answers, gamely, "Giulia Farnese."

A pang seizes her at the sound of Giulia's voice. The beautiful Lady Farnese had drifted away from the family in the wake of her father's poisoning. Some of it, she suspects, had been the realization that Father could not be Pope forever, and that she must make her provisions for it. Provisions the rest of the Borgias, by the very nature of their entanglements with Pope Alexander, could not.

For the rest of it, Lucrezia suspects that her father's deepening suspicions of any and all outside the family had been the cause. Still, she does not know. All she knows is that her friend and mentor had pulled away from them all, and Lucrezia had fallen deep into the pit that was Naples, and by the time she returned, Giulia was far away, too far to be reached, for all that she had remained in Rome.

But those days are not here, yet. Perhaps, if she is fortunate, those days will never come.

"Why are you holding a goat, Giulia Farnese?" She asks.

Giulia smiles at her. "It will be a unicorn."

Lucrezia knows she should come closer, should admire the pendant about Giulia's neck, and demand seashells and a seahorse for her own portrait. But she has no interest in sitting to be painted. There is too much else to be done.

"You should have a real unicorn," she says instead. It seems precisely the sort of foolish thing a girl of six-and-ten might say. It's not even entirely flattery, though it probably sounds it.

"Alas, my dear," Giulia says, all surprise, "I do not think a unicorn would have me! But you are very kind to say so. And now you have the advantage of me, for you know my name, but I don't know yours."

Lucrezia smiles at her. "I'm Lucrezia."

"Ah, so you would be Lucrezia Borgia? You're as lovely as your father says."

There's a moment she feels split in two. For all she has lived through, those words still gladden her to hear. And yet some part of her is slightly bitter that even as she lives her life again, her greatest asset to her father is her beauty, rather than her nature. But that is as it must be, she supposes.

She smiles and politely thanks Giulia, and then, even though she knows full well just why her father brought Giulia into the Vatican, asks, "Did my father bring you here to be my friend?"

The look on Giulia's face, the frozen, caught out expression, almost makes Lucrezia laugh. She's had too much practice schooling her own features to let her amusement show. Still, she can't help but enjoy the discomfiture.

"The Holy Father is helping me. With… matters of the soul," is her response.

Lucrezia remembers what she'd said to Alfonso, the night after their wedding night. _Ours must be a love of the soul_. His puzzled expression returns in her thoughts. _You mean like brother and sister?_

She supposes that she had meant that, in the end. She has no illusion that this is what Giulia Farnese means.

"The Holy Father is trying to lift your spirits by having your portrait painted? I didn't know he could be so odd."

It's not that she truly objects to her father taking a new lover. Mother's heart will be broken further, but Father is who he is, and chooses what he chooses, and her anger with him would be a waste of her breath. She is not the one he listens to.

But she wants Giulia to say it. To admit it. Though she knows she may well be asking for the impossible.

"That wasn't quite what I — you _know_!" Giulia's voice speaks of surprise, and a little dismay. But she sounds relieved as she adds, "You already know. But when why — ah. We don't have to be enemies, Lucrezia. I wish us to be friends. It's unkind, don't you think, how women let men divide them?"

Then, Lucrezia had fully agreed. She had liked people who liked her. She _still_ likes people who like her. And Giulia had seemed so sincere. She hadn't questioned. Now, she looks at Giulia and wonders. It seems such an obvious manipulation, such an easy way to set the rest of the family at their ease.

How can she say it? How can she open her mouth and say, _Father loving you will break my mother's heart_ , and then add _but I think I'll love you anyway, so long as you love me?_

And even Giulia faded away, eventually. Giovanni Sforza and Alfonso had shown her, and Giulia had proved it. Only the bonds of the family, whatever those bonds might be, can be truly trusted.

At last, Lucrezia says, "I will think on that. For now, Giulia Farnese, you may kiss my cheek and call me a friend. I fear for Mother's heart, but I cannot wish you ill."

Giulia smiles.

It won't be like her last life. Lucrezia has learned too much of the world, has gotten too old, and is not willing enough to pretend she hasn't. But that doesn't mean it can't be good.

Does it?

#

Cesare has still not returned home by the time she makes her way there. She searches her recollection for where he might have been, what he might have been doing, but she can come up with nothing. Whatever his doings, they had been secret, then, and she has no insight into them now.

These are the hours that she could curse God for inflicting upon her: at least, when first she lived these long days through, she had no idea of how little she knew. Now, she sees, and now, it chafes. Worse yet, she is caught in some Purgatory place, of knowing too much of the nature of the people around her, too much of their fates, and too little of their deeds and the workings of power as they'd stood.

This, she must change. And if she cannot seek out Cesare — 

The sight of Juan pressed close against one of the kitchen maids fills Lucrezia with the same anger — cold but spreading, leaving a mind clear of all but hatred and a belly that had felt on fire — that she'd felt the night she'd taken up the candelabrum.

"Brother," she says, and her voice snaps, crackling with something she doubts Juan has yet heard from her.

Her voice actually manages to startle him away from the maid. The other woman flashes a look in her direction that could be grateful or annoyed or neither, so quickly does it pass across her face and then vanish.

His own features falter a moment before he smooths his face into something unperturbed. He answers her with, "Sister."

"I seek counsel," she says, and feels a twinge of guilt at the way his expression brightens, at one pleased and surprised. "Father has entered a game whose only coin is power, and I…"

She will be its bargaining piece.

She does not need to say it. Even Juan, impolitic as he is, knows where power lies, and how it is taken. How it is traded. He knows — they all know — what must become of her, even if Cesare had wanted so much to pretend he did not.

He follows her to the library, and she points to Florence. "I think I must go there," she says, "if I am to be of any real use."

"There are no Sforzas there," Juan says. "And they are our greatest threat."

"It was not a Sforza who tried to poison Father and murder us in our palazzo." Her voice comes out sharp again and it's plain to see how much that startles him.

Juan is not used to a Lucrezia who is ever worse than cross because she hasn't had her way. She eyes him back and hopes that he will take care, in the coming years, in the coming strife. She hopes he will learn caution, even if she must teach it to him now. If he does, they neither of them will have to see what depths she can sink to.

"You're not wrong, sister — the Sforzas actually stood to gain, at least then. Ascanio Sforza would never have tried to poison our father." He pauses, staring at the map. "Could this coward be long for Rome, do you think?"

"Our brother has found a professional," she says, softly. "If the man who would have rid the world of Borgias remains, it will not be for long. And if he returns, he will only do so with an army at his back."

Juan graciously ignores her mention of Cesare. But he dismisses her nonetheless: "Where would he even _find_ an army? Do you think he could hope to hire enough condottieri?"

She takes in a deep breath and lets it out, counting as high as she can until she has to breathe again. It was a trick that let her keep her temper in the latter half of his life, before he began threatening Giovanni.

"It cannot be Spain, for we are Spanish. It will not be the little German kingdoms. Who is left?" she says, pointing at the map on the wall. "Is the army of France not a force to be feared? And does France not desperately desire something only the Pope can give?"

Juan's eyes slide over to her, dark and watchful, and she remembers that though this brother lacks Cesare's genius, he has his own cunning. "You've grown thoughtful since Father's investiture."

Part of her panics in fear that she's overplayed her hand. She's been dancing on the edge of suspicion for days now, and now, at last, she's tipped over it, and for _Juan_ , of all people.

She cannot freeze. If she freezes, all may as well be lost. Indeed, she must brazen it out, let audacity, let mendacity, be her refuge.

"You mean to say I have not always been thoughtful?" She arches her brows, asks it sweetly, and it breaks the tension that had been building.

"Well, you never shared your thoughts with me," he says, and his tone puts her in mind of the sulky boy he'd always been. The sulky boy he hadn't taken the chance to grow out of.

But it hasn't happened yet.

"You're here," she says, as if it's that simple. In a way, it is. She does not add that Juan has no interest in keeping her innocent, in preserving her brightness, as Cesare had. How strange, to think their places have changed. Now, it is Cesare's innocence, the bright boy she loved above all others and always had, that she seeks to protect.

"I suppose I am at that, sister." Juan stares at the map for a few moments, and then says, "The Medici."

"The Medici?"

"They're the family to marry you into, if we want to win power in Florence. Which you seem to think will keep France from marching their army into the Romagna, and you may not be wrong."

They hadn't, before. But that can change, she thinks. Even if it doesn't, she thinks she could charm King Charles again, if only she would have the chance.

She offers Juan a smile, and he smiles back. And for these few moments, he is merely her brother.


End file.
